What's on in Whitecraig

East Lothian, Scotland

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From farmers' markets to craft fairs that'll actually have something you want to buy — Whitecraig knows how to put on a do. We're talking proper local events here: quiz nights that get genuinely competitive, coffee mornings that serve actual decent coffee (not the instant stuff), and village fêtes that are surprisingly well organised. No stadium concerts or festivals that cost a week's wages, just the good stuff happening in village halls, community centres, and that one pub everyone knows about. We're here to make sure you don't miss any of it.

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Hannah Lavery - Everything Everyday: A Year of Empty Promises

Hannah Lavery - Everything Everyday: A Year of Empty Promises

It's a pleasure to be welcoming Hannah Lavery back to the bookshop for the publication day launch of her new poetry collection, Everything Everyday: A Year of Empty Promises. Lavery will be in conversation with fellow poet and former Scottish Makar Jackie Kay. Don't miss out on what will be a beautiful celebration of Lavery's poetry!This event will take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. There will be a signing after the event.About Everything Everyday:Everything Everyday is a poetic journal of the year that charts winter through to autumn in a richly textured sequence of diary-poems, lyric fragments and a crown of sonnets.Each month’s entry weaves together mythic figures – Tahlequah the mourning orca, Brigid’s mountain dance, Sister Icarus’s fragile flight and Beira’s shore vigils – with the unfolding chronicle of contemporary grief and protest. Readers move from January’s frozen harbour and political flashpoints into spring’s ritual planting of ‘lemon-drop’ seeds, summer’s drum-driven rallies and smoky vigils, and autumn’s oil-slick swans and ash-borne snowdrops. The collection’s formal innovations mirror its thematic urgency: bracketed interjections pulse like heartbeats, dated stanzas resonate like journal entries, and the season-by-season structure creates a mythic ledger of solidarity and hope.

Thu 7 May18:00The Portobello Bookshop(4mi)

via The Portobello BookshopLocal gem

Yin Yang Wedding Band

Yin Yang Wedding Band

Yin Yang Wedding Band at Wallyford Miners Club. Consider this your nudge. The organiser's site is your next stop for the details.

Sat 9 MayWallyford Miners Club(1.6mi)

via Wallyford Miners Club

Polly Atkin - Swimming the Seasons

Polly Atkin - Swimming the Seasons

It's always a pleasure when Polly Atkin visits and we're looking forward to her return for the launch of Swimming the Seasons: A Freshwater Almanac right here by the Porty seaside! This is a book about resilience, mindfulness and the transformative embrace of wild water.This event will take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. There will be a signing after the event.About Swimming the Seasons:To swim is an act of attention: to the self, and to everything beyond it.Follow poet and nature writer Polly Atkin as she swims through the turning year in the rivers, lakes and tarns of the English Lake District, in this lyrical ode to the uplifting power of water. This is a love story between a person and a place. It is a story of acceptance, persistence and finding joy in the everyday, as eight years of outdoor swimming through every season deepen Atkin’s knowledge and understanding of both the landscape she calls home and her disabled body.Each month in the water reveals how a life lived with pain can be as rich, rewarding and full of delight as any other. Atkin swims for the sheer pleasure of it, showing how that pleasure may be found in every season, even by those who find the cold neither thrilling nor soothing. She reminds us of the quiet power of noticing the lives alongside ours — birds, plants and people.

Tue 12 May18:00The Portobello Bookshop(4mi)

via The Portobello BookshopLocal gem

Will Maclean - Solace House

Will Maclean - Solace House

We are so excited for Will Maclean to join us for the Edinburgh launch of his latest novel, Solace House. He will be joined by Kirsty Logan for what is sure to be an outstanding discussion of this spectacular, mysterious story.This event will take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. There will be a signing after the event.About Solace House:Summer, 1993, and Alex Lane finds himself at the end of the University summer term, broke and without any concrete plans. So, when he’s offered the chance to join a group of students tasked with clearing out Solace House, a large Victorian residence left to the University by a reclusive hoarder called Flayne, he other students are a mixed bunch, but Alex quickly falls into a close friendship with the mercurial, red-headed Ella.At first the house seems to be an ordinary, if grandiose, property. But as the team begin sorting through piles of junk, they stumble upon Flayne’s journals in which he details his obsession with his missing mother, his discovery of a strange place called Bewise, and – most mysteriously – his belief in another realm lying parallel to ours, along with coded instructions on how it might be reached.As the students continue to sort through the detritus, one of Alex’s companions becomes increasingly obsessed with the hidden secrets of Solace House, Flayne’s missing mother, and the possibility that, if only they can decipher Flayne’s...

Thu 14 May18:00The Portobello Bookshop(4mi)

via The Portobello BookshopLocal gem

Heart 2 Heart

Heart 2 Heart

Heart 2 Heart at Wallyford Miners Club. That's all we've got, but sometimes a good title is all you need. Intrigued? Us too.

Sat 16 MayWallyford Miners Club(1.6mi)

via Wallyford Miners Club

An Evening with Douglas Stuart

An Evening with Douglas Stuart

We're absolutely thrilled to announce that this coming May, we'll be hosting the launch of Douglas Stuart's new novel, John of John. We've been looking forward to this novel so much, as Douglas is a shop favourite. Our event is a full five days before the book is published, so grab your ticket now for early access to John of John!One of the most enjoyable events we've ever hosted was for his previous novel, Young Mungo, and we've been eagerly anticipating his next book. He'll be in conversation with Nicola Sturgeon, and we can't think of a better way to enjoy a summer Saturday evening than by listening to them discuss this wonderful new novel.Our team already loves John of John, the story of a young man's return home to the Isle of Harris after studying in Glasgow, exploring the complex emotions and dynamics that such a return can entail. This is a truly special novel, and it's a privilege to host the launch with one of our favourite writers. Join us on May 16th for what promises to be a really special evening.About John of John:Everything he owned fit into a backpack and one doubled bin bag. It had taken him less than ten minutes to pack up four years of his life. It had taken a little longer to fold himself away, to hide all the bits of himself that had slowly been unfurling since he had arrived on the mainland.

Sat 16 May18:30The Portobello Bookshop(4mi)

via The Portobello BookshopLocal gem

All Age Service

This morning’s service will be held in Rosewell Church, led by our minister. Tea and coffee will be served after the service. All are welcome.

Sun 17 May11:00Lasswade Parish Church(4mi)

via Lasswade Parish Church

Nature Writing Workshop with Rebecca Ferrier and Elspeth Wilson

Nature Writing Workshop with Rebecca Ferrier and Elspeth Wilson

Join debut writers Rebecca Ferrier, author of The Salt Bind, and Elspeth Wilson, author of These Mortal Bodies, for this relaxed, inclusive workshop on nature writing in fiction. In this two-hour workshop, participants will explore different exercises to consider nature as character and its role in scene setting, plot and world-building. We recommend this workshop for participants with a project in development, or who are keen to build towards a larger fiction project in the future. There will be an opportunity for questions towards the workshop's end, with the chance to ask about securing a literary agent or general industry advice. Space is limited to ensure everyone can fully participate. We look forward to welcoming you in-person to the bookshop for this chance to learn, develop, and discuss writing with two brilliant authors!

Mon 18 May17:30The Portobello Bookshop(4mi)

via The Portobello BookshopLocal gem

Lauren Elkin - Vocal Break

Lauren Elkin - Vocal Break

We are so excited that Lauren Elkin is coming to Portobello for an event to celebrate the publication of her new book, Vocal Break: On Women, Music & Power. It's a dazzlingly original reassessment of the power and plurality of women's singing voices by the critically acclaimed author of Art Monsters and Scaffolding. Elkin will be in conversation with art writer, editor and curator Rachel Ashenden.This event will take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. There will be a signing after the event.About Vocal Break:For millennia, women’s raised voices have been heard as unruly, uncivilized, dangerous. Women singing were cast as sirens: mythical creatures who lured sailors to their death.In Vocal Break, Lauren Elkin seamlessly blends memoir, feminist manifesto and cultural history to explore a plurality of female singing voices – and how women have used them to defy convention, genre, capitalism, racism and sexism.Drawing on her own experiences training as a young soprano in the 1990s, Elkin reflects on the way power and identity shape our voices, focusing on the women who most excited her when she was learning to sing. A vocal break refers to the place where the voice shifts from lower to higher registers and this is a book about what kind of meanings, and sounds, can be made there.

Tue 19 May18:00The Portobello Bookshop(4mi)

via The Portobello BookshopLocal gem

Retro

Retro

We found this gem on Wallyford Miners Club's website. Retro — sounds like it could be a cracker, doesn't it?

Sat 23 MayWallyford Miners Club(1.6mi)

via Wallyford Miners Club

Ruth Ozeki - The Typing Lady and Other Fictions

Ruth Ozeki - The Typing Lady and Other Fictions

We are so pleased to be welcoming Ruth Ozeki to the bookshop to discuss her brilliant new book, The Typing Lady and Other Fictions. The first story collection from the Booker Prize finalist and winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction is cause for celebration and we couldn't be happier that she will be here and in conversation with Sam Baker, host of The Shift podcast.This event will take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. There will be a signing after the event.About The Typing Lady and Other Fictions:The first story collection from the Booker Prize finalist and winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction about the lives we almost lived, the people we can’t quite forget and the stories that shape us long after the last page is turned.Exploring childhood ambition, youthful desire, midlife reinvention, and the unsparing clarity of old age, Ozeki brings us 12 richly imagined stories of characters standing at life’s thresholds. A college student falls for her professor and learns to transmute longing into language. A disquieted husband watches as the ghost of his wife’s ambition roams the woods outside their home. A long-deceased Beat poet hijacks the mind of a young publishing assistant and rails against the state of modern literature.

Tue 26 May18:00The Portobello Bookshop(4mi)

via The Portobello BookshopLocal gem

Jem Calder - I Want You to Be Happy

Jem Calder - I Want You to Be Happy

We're excited to welcome Jem Calder for an evening event to discuss his debut novel, I Want You to Be Happy. Calder's debut short story collection, Reward System, was published to much fanfare and praised by the likes of Sally Rooney in 2022.Funny, excruciating, and true, I Want You to Be Happy is a sharp-eyed tale of two people searching for meaning and connection in modern times, missing the mark maybe, but trying.This event will take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. There will be a signing after the event.About I Want You to Be Happy:Chuck and Joey meet in a bar. He's in his mid-thirties; she's twelve years younger. He's long abandoned his ambition of becoming a novelist and now works as a copyeditor at a big ad agency. "Lead copywriter," he corrects himself.Joey lives paycheck to paycheck on her barista wages and privately dreams of making it as a poet. They go back to Chuck's luxury flat - a world away from Joey's cramped house-share, the crumbs in her bed.Soon, Joey's imagining a future between them, and Chuck's moving on from a major change in his recent past. Amazing, how meeting a new person can make you feel so new.

Thu 28 May18:00The Portobello Bookshop(4mi)

via The Portobello BookshopLocal gem

Little Big Sound

Little Big Sound

Wallyford Miners Club has got Little Big Sound pencilled in. We've got the date — they've got the detail. Between us, you're sorted.

Sat 30 MayWallyford Miners Club(1.6mi)

via Wallyford Miners Club

Three Churches Joint Service

Filed under: Three Churches Joint Service at Lasswade Parish Church looked too good not to mention. You're very welcome.

Sun 31 May11:00Lasswade Parish Church(4mi)

via Lasswade Parish Church

Shannon Chakraborty - The Tapestry of Fate

Shannon Chakraborty - The Tapestry of Fate

The Portobello Bookshop is overjoyed to welcome Shannon Chakraborty to Edinburgh for a discussion of her latest book The Tapestry of Fate. This is the highly-anticipated sequel to The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, an epic historical fantasy full of pirates, magic, and, you guessed it, adventure! Chakraborty is the author of the beloved Daevabad Trilogy, starting with City of Brass. Join us for a brilliant conversation between Shannon and fellow fantasy author Hannah Kaner for an insight to the spellbinding world of Amina al-Sirafi.This event will take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. Doors open at 6:45. There will be a signing after the event.About The Tapestry of Fate:Amina al-Sirafi thinks she’s struck gold. Tasked with hunting down magical artifacts for the council of immortal peris, she can savour the occasional adventure on the high seas with her cherished criminal companions while still returning home to raise her beloved daughter.But when Raksh, the spirit of discord with whom she is reluctantly wed, provokes the council’s wrath, Amina is charged with a seemingly impossible quest: steal a spindle capable of rewriting fate from a mysterious sorceress on an island no one can escape.Forced to leave her daughter, Amina finds her mission almost immediately thrown into peril. But deadly storms, an erratic poison mistress, and old enemies are the least of her worries.

Thu 4 Jun18:00The Portobello Bookshop(4mi)

via The Portobello BookshopLocal gem

Heart 2 Heart

Heart 2 Heart

Right then — Heart 2 Heart at Wallyford Miners Club. We've nabbed the essentials, they've kept the juicy bits for their own site.

Sat 6 JunWallyford Miners Club(1.6mi)

via Wallyford Miners Club

Olivia Laing - The Silver Book

Olivia Laing - The Silver Book

It's our great pleasure to be welcoming Olivia Laing to the bookshop for an event to celebrate the paperback publication of their latest novel, The Silver Book. Laing will be in conversation with Fiona Bradley, the Director of Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery.This event will take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. There will be a signing after the event.About The Silver Book:It is September 1974. Two men meet by chance in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realising the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini’s Casanova. A young – and beautiful – apprentice is just what he needs.He sweeps Nicholas to Rome, into the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini’s horrifying fable of fascism.But Nicholas has a secret and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amidst the rising tensions of Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he didn’t intend...

Tue 9 Jun18:00The Portobello Bookshop(4mi)

via The Portobello BookshopLocal gem

Little Big Sound

Little Big Sound

Little Big Sound is happening at Wallyford Miners Club. We've got the when and where — their site has the why and the how much.

Sat 13 JunWallyford Miners Club(1.6mi)

via Wallyford Miners Club

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Event details on Near Here are aggregated from third-party sources and may change. Always verify times, location, availability, and any price directly with the organiser before travelling. See Terms.